Other scheme settings allow options such as deployment of reinforcement crates, from which additional weapons can be obtained, and sudden death where the game is rushed to a conclusion after a time limit expires.

He began work on the project in 1990 under the name Artillery, based on previous tank games from the 8-bit era using a Casio graphing calculator as an experiment for his own amusement.

[5][6][7][8] Davidson later moved development of Artillery to the Amiga in August 1993, which allowed to expand his idea further, leading him to introduce new elements and a graphical style to distinguish his project from its spiritual predecessors.

Featuring 55,000 levels, publications compared it with both Lemmings and Cannon Fodder due to its visual style and themes,[5][6][7][8][9] which Team17's project manager Marcus Dyson later claimed was planned from start.

[5][6] The object and landscape sets used to generate the field are arranged into thematics including forests, martian terrains, beaches and hell.

[21][22][23] The North American release of the PlayStation version was the subject of considerable negotiation, as Sony Computer Entertainment of America had a policy against 2D games being published for the console.

[29][30] It also served as the final Atari-licensed title ever to be released for the Jaguar; two months earlier, on March 13, 1998, JTS Corporation sold all the assets of Atari Corporation, including the Atari name, to Hasbro Interactive,[31] which, one year later, would release all of the Jaguar's rights into the public domain.

Released only for PC, it added a single player campaign and the ability to add custom levels and soundpacks (which was already available for the Amiga version), in addition of full motion video sequences.

It is largely built upon the original Amiga game engine with various gameplay enhancement and additions, as well as graphical improvements and fixes.

[5] During the development of Worms 2, Andy Davidson wrote this special edition produced exclusively for the Amiga's AGA chipset.

Praising the need for both strategy and skill, the multiplayer design, and the randomly generated landscapes, they described Worms as "the kind of game that makes no excuses for its lack of texture-mapped polygons or its minimalist gameplay.

With multiplayer ability of up to four people, Worms is one of those games that is so unique, it doesn't fit into any category - except innovative and incredibly addictive.

[78] GameSpot criticized the slowness of large multiplayer sessions and the imprecision of the keyboard controls, but, like Sega Saturn Magazine, they lauded the combination of surface simplicity and underlying complexity, summarizing that "Like the board game Othello, Worms takes only a few minutes to learn, but may take a lifetime to master.

"[46] Conversely, the Amiga Power review, written in the style of a magazine personality quiz, whilst praising the detail of the animation, described frustrating imbalances especially in relation to the vaunted 16-player multiplayer mode and was critical of the puerility of the game's humour.